Three new books on spatial reason and politics have recently appeared. Remarkably, they all come from a single publisher, the University of Chicago Press in the last year or so. The History of Cartography Vol III, Cartography in the European Renaissance (edited by David Woodward). Abysmal, by Gunnar Olsson. The Sovereign Map by Christian Jacob. […]

Denis Wood’s samizdat essay on “Shadowed Spaces, In Defense of Indefensible Space” has finally been made available in its original form. The essay, which constitutes a kind of defense of heterotopic spaces, has previously only been available in photocopy and a more formal published version. Wood is a designer, psychogeographer, and author of many books […]

Update: If you’re looking for the Halloween “Terror Behind the Walls” at Eastern State, click here!! This summer I’m in Philadelphia, staying literally around the corner from the famous Eastern State Penitentiary, discussed by Foucault in Discipline & Punish, pp. 123-126 & 237-239. Click here for a Google map I made. Advertisements

Michael Friendly is a professor at York University in Toronto and has done some absolutely amazing archival work on early examples of thematic mapping. You may recognize some of the names: Advertisements

Colin Gordon has provided the text of a letter he wrote to the TLS in response to Scull, which they have declined to publish. I’m pleased to be able to present it here for the first time. –Jeremy Advertisements

A transcript of a talk Zizek gave last year in London: “Just like Heidegger with Nazis, Foucault has been heavily criticized for supposed lapse, error in his thought, over his engagement with Iranian revolution. But again, my thought here is that – just like Heidegger – he did the right thing, only again, in wrong […]

Last week’s AAG conference in San Francisco is officially over and I’m back home. Actually getting home is another story, the moral of which is that Atlanta’s airport is super busy on Sunday evenings so don’t even think of getting a taxi (the line was wrapped around 3-4 times at 10pm). A 45 minute wait […]

Steven Johnson is the author of Ghost Map, a book about the cholera epidemics of 19th century London and the famous work of John Snow. Snow is sometimes described as the father of epidemiology and his maps have been very influential in geography and cartography. Advertisements

In the forthcoming English translation of Security, Territory, and Population, Foucault discusses the notion of the “specific qualities” of a territory (as Elden points out, in a phrase omitted from the original 1991 publication, “within its frontiers.” Foucault observes in STP that this makes the modern era the era of statistics: Because statistics is etymologically […]